i. Welcome Emails

Most email marketing providers offer the ability to customize and send an automated welcome email.

To set this up for free in MailChimp, click on the “Campaigns” tab, then click on, “Create Campaign.”

Type, “Welcome,” into the search bar.

Then click on the “Welcome new subscribers,” option that comes up.

MailChimp will walk you through setting up the campaign. Give it a name you’ll recognize later.

You could create two different welcome emails: one for customers who are interested in women’s fashion and one for customers interested in men’s fashion, for example.

You can choose to create a “Welcome message,” which is only one email, or an, “Onboarding series,” which can include a few emails spaced out over time.

For most retailers, a simple one-email welcome message works well.

You can choose when subscribers receive the email, either immediately after signing up or after a set number of days, by clicking on, “Edit trigger,” at the top.

Click on, “Design Email,” to create your welcome email.

Enter in all the fields MailChimp prompts you to, and click, “Next.”

You can choose from one of MailChimp’s premade templates, or upload your own HTML email template.

The template you choose will depend on your goals. If you want to show off a new or featured product, pick something like the, “Sell Products,” or “Make an Announcement,” templates with lots of image space.

For a simple discount coupon, the “Follow Up,” template works nicely.

It’s very intuitive to design your email with the drag and drop editor.

Once you’re done creating your email, clicking, “Save and Continue,” will take you back to your welcome series overview.

If you only want to send one email, you’re done!

Optionally, you can add another email to the series by clicking, “Add Email,” at the bottom.

You can use a sleeknote on your website to offer a coupon code to visitors who sign up for your promotional emails. A common coupon is 10% off your first order.

According to Shopify, stores with an active discount code are eight times more likely to make a sale than those without any discounts.

4. Email Marketing Engagement Statistics

However, conversion rates are still higher on desktop for e-commerce retailers. Mobile e-commerce conversion rates have been increasing since phones became better at browsing online, but they still lag behind desktop.

If your email marketing service doesn’t offer A/B testing, you can do it yourself by segmenting your list in half. Send each half a different version of your subject line and see which one has the better response.

There are a lot of tips out there on what words perform the best in subject lines. It can really depend on your industry.

For e-commerce retailers, words like, “sale,” “free sample,” “reward,” or something similar has high open rates, for obvious reasons.

People love getting a deal or something for free.

Phrasee, a company that uses AI to analyze subject lines, recently conducted a survey of 211 commonly-used words in email subject lines.

They scored each word out of 100, with 1 being the least effective in driving a response, and 100 being the most effective.

For calls to action, “introducing,” had the highest score with 67/100.